The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

This catastrophic view of future air war did not take place in a vacuum. Politicians were easily persuaded of the fear themselves, often equally ignorant about the true state of possibilities, and sensitive to their responsibilities in trying to reduce any risk that bombing civilian populations might actually happen. The British prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, claimed in 1936 that after a gas and bomb attack ‘the raging peoples of every country, torn with passion, suffering and horror, would wipe out every Government in Europe’.³⁹ A strong case can be made to show that the willingness of British statesmen to concede the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia during the 1938 Munich crisis was based on fear of air raids on British cities.⁴⁰ Since bombing was always imagined as a war directed at cities and civilians, the search in the interwar years for ways to avert or reduce the threat to the civilian population became a political question rather than a strictly military one, not least because ‘total war’ would mean reliance on civilian industry and workers if it were to be waged successfully. At first governments pursued ways of outlawing the bombing of non-military targets, or even outlawing military aircraft altogether. When that effort broke down in the 1930s, governments across Europe reacted by introducing national programmes of civil defence to try to mitigate the disastrous social and political effects bombing was expected to provoke.

The search for international agreement on the bombing threat raised numerous difficulties, as had all efforts to reach international agreement on the laws of war in the half-century since the 1874 Brussels Conference first tried to define them. The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 explicitly prohibited the use of bombing from the air, and Convention IV in 1907 spelt out that this prohibition extended to attacks on civilians or the destruction of civilian property by aerial bombardment. Although the convention had the force of international law, not all of those states present at The Hague subsequently ratified its provisions, including Germany and France.⁴¹ During the Great War these prohibitions were regularly violated in the bombing undertaken by both sides. At the Washington Disarmament Conference in 1922, which successfully limited naval armaments, agreement was reached to establish a committee of international jurists to draw up definite rules of engagement for air warfare. The Commission met at The Hague between December 1922 and February 1923 and drew up what became known as The Hague Rules for Air Warfare. No state ratified the rules, but they were widely understood to define what was regarded as acceptable practice in future air war and they were used as a reference point in subsequent discussions of the legal implications of civilian bombing. Bombing was governed by two principal articles: Article 22 outlawed any bombing deliberately intended to destroy civilian property or kill non-combatants; Article 24 restricted bombing only to known and identifiable military objectives and, most significantly, only permitted bombing of those objectives ‘in the immediate vicinity of the operation of the land forces’. In this case bombing could be lawfully conducted, even when the military objective was close to habitation.⁴²